Creatures of Habit: A Field Guide to Video Software Codecs
Christine Perey
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Content Summary
A lightweight summary of commodity, commercially-available video codecs, ranging from realtime encoding (Intel Indeo) to way-slow (fractal-based SoftVideo). Emphasis is on "mundane" properties such as vendor support, OS compatibility, the future of the company, etc. rather than technical merit of each approach. A few hints are given on how to choose a system based on some high-level criteria (source video content, whether you need fast compression, etc.)
Relevance to Multimedia
Probably relevant if you're buying a system, but even in such a case I'd want a lot more technical detail than what this article offers.
Rating
1 out of 5: not much content here. A single table would have been sufficient to present all of this information.
RIVL: A Resolution-Independent Video Language
Jonathan Swartz and Brian C. Smith, Cornell Univ.
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Description of a "language" (really just a set of primitive operations) for describing various transformations on video (overlay, fade, rotate/translate, convolve, crop, cut clip, etc.), and examples of how these primitives can be used to create some standard video effects. The Source video properties such as encoding format, resolution, timecode system, etc. are abstracted away by the language. IMHO calling this a "language" is generous, but the idea of distilling some primitive operations on video objects and providing them in a resolution-independent way is sound.
Relevance to Multimedia
Potentially a great platform for prototyping video editors; has the potential to do for video some of what Tk has done for GUI's, i.e. make high-level abstractions so easy to use that integrating video into applications will be trivial. However, like Tk, there is no concern for code compactness or performance.
Rating
4 out of 5: this is a "why hasn't someone thought of this before" paper.
Armando Fox (fox@cs.berkeley.edu)
Armando Fox (fox@cs.berkeley.edu)